Protesters scale UK's Didcot power plant chimney

LONDON (Reuters) - Environmental campaigners tried to starve Britain's Didcot power station of fuel and scaled its 200-meter high chimney in protest against coal fired plants on Monday, while operator RWE npower switched to burning gas at the flexible plant for the time being.

About 20 protesters from the Camp for Climate Action got into the power station in Oxfordshire in the southeast early on Monday morning, with some heading up the chimney and others trying to stop a conveyor belt from feeding it with coal.

German utility E.ON's plan to build a new coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth in Kent was the focus of environmental protests in Britain until the project was frozen in early October.

"Since E.ON shelved their plans to build a new coal plant at Kingsnorth this month, we realized npower is the new frontline," Amy Johnson, one of the protesters, said in a statement.

"We're going to stay here until they say they'll stop building new coal plants. We know that might take a while but we're patient."

RWE plans to build coal fired plants in Germany and is looking at building "cleaner coal" plants in England.

The protesters said in a statement on Monday morning they had shut the plant down. But data from National Grid shows three of the four units at the 2,000-megawatt plant were running on Monday afternoon, while another was already on a planned outage when the protest began.

Built as a coal-fired plant, three of Didcot's four generating units have been converted to burn natural gas or coal because of changing market and environmental conditions.

Although the protest did not succeed in shutting Didcot, it should briefly cut the power plant's emissions because burning gas emits much less climate-warming carbon than coal.

"They are all running on gas," the spokesman said of the three operational units, adding if needed more coal could be fed into Didcot without using the conveyor.

RWE npower said the company had stopped the conveyor belt that feeds coal into the plant for safety reasons while the protesters were near the belt, adding there were already piles of coal inside the plant before the stoppage.

One of the units tripped early Monday, due to a technical issue unrelated to the protest, but was restarted around midday.

(Reporting by Daniel Fineren)